GTD and Business Analysis

03-19-2013, 02:20 PM

Hi all,

I am new to GTD, and I am having trouble figuring out how to apply the concepts to my job. I am a Business Analyst, and I usually have anywhere from one to four projects assigned to me at any given time. Each of my projects have several deliverables, which require anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to complete. These deliverables include Business Requirements Documents (BRD), Business Impact Analysis (BIA) documents, test strategies, and process flows.

Should I consider each of these deliverables a separate project? Or should I keep these items in Project Plan folders?

You should do what makes sense to you, as long as it works well. If the deliverables for a given assignment have some relationship such as common data or dependencies, then perhaps the deliverables should be combined in a single project. If they are largely independent or are delivered on different time scales, then perhaps not. A good test might be to check that your projects have well-defined desired outcomes.

Comment

I create 1 project and in my project information sheet I keep note of the status of each deliverable. I basically check them off as I get done. I have a checklist which has all the standard deliverables so I'm not having to remember this for each project I get on. And then I create as many next actions as it makes sense to create. So I can be working on many deliverables at the same time if they all have next actions I can move forward.

To keep me on track with deadlines, I will add ticklers that would be "Project X BIA draft due" for instance.

But if you're working with a project manager who keeps some of this detailed stuff in a project plan, I link instead to that project plan from my project information sheet and try to keep duplication from that project plan into my GTD system to a minimum.